Google will compete against AT&T, which plans gigabit service for San Antonio.

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Google today said it is beginning design work on a fiber network for San Antonio, Texas. With 1.4 million residents, it will be the biggest Google Fiber city so far.

San Antonio is the ninth metro area where Google has confirmed it will bring its $70-per-month gigabit fiber service. This includes three metro areas where Google Fiber is already available—Kansas City in Kansas and Missouri; Austin, Texas; and Provo, Utah—and six where it's planned.

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(Clarification: While the Kansas City and Atlanta metropolitan areas each have more than 1.4 million residents, Google noted that San Antonio itself has more residents than the other Google Fiber cities.)

Google did not say when fiber service will be ready in San Antonio. "Soon, we’ll enter the design phase of building our fiber network in San Antonio," Mark Strama, the head of Google Fiber in Texas, wrote in the announcement. "We’ll work closely with city leaders over the next several months to plan the layout of over 4,000 miles of fiber-optic cables—enough to stretch to Canada and back—across the metro area. This is no small task, and it will take some time, but we can’t wait to get started."

Google has rolled out fiber in phases in other cities, starting with neighborhoods where there's the most demand, so it's not clear when or if all of San Antonio will be wired up. San Antonio's City Council approved a long-term contract with Google Fiber in March 2014, but Google still only listed San Antonio as a "potential fiber city" until upgrading it to an "upcoming fiber city" today. Strama reportedly said today that it will take a few years to complete construction in San Antonio, but presumably parts of the city would get service much earlier than that.

Besides San Antonio, Google says it plans to bring fiber to Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; Nashville, Tennessee; and Salt Lake City in Utah.

Correction:An earlier version of this story said that the Kansas City metropolitan area has more residents than the San Antonio metro area. In fact, the San Antonio metro area is more populous than Kansas City's.